Читать книгу India under Ripon: A Private Diary - Wilfrid Scawen Blunt - Страница 5

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MADRAS

“12th Nov.

“After a good passage of about fifteen hours we sighted the Indian coast, first the western hills, and then the low shore off Tuticorin. We have been carrying four hundred and thirty-five Indian labourers coming home after working in Ceylon. The captain says they carry 15,000 every year each way. They are fat and merry, so I judge that they thrive during their absence from home—all I believe Hindu Tamils. On the pier we were met by twenty or thirty Moslems, representing the local Mohammedan population of two hundred families. They had been telegraphed to about us by Ibrahim Didi. A Moor from Galle, Kasim Biak, did the honours, entertaining us at breakfast with a friend, Bawa Sahib, also from Ceylon. The native Moslems seem very poor. I asked them about their condition, and they complained of having no school. Their Imam had work enough to do leading the prayers five times a day, and had no leisure to teach. They also complained of being subject to annoyance from the Hindus, who came with drums outside their mosque, and that the magistrate, being a Hindu, would not prevent it. They all wear a turban here, as do the Hindu Tamils. There seemed to be no English resident in Tuticorin at all. We only stayed two hours, and then went on by train, accompanied by our Mohammedan friends, now increased to about fifty.

“The country for a mile or two inland is pure sand, and very pretty with its desert vegetation, thorn acacias and groves of dom palms. The heavy rains had brought up beautiful bright green grass, on which flocks of long-legged goats were led to feed. By the side of the railroad I noticed several birds well known to me, the turtle dove of Egypt, the kite, the hen-harrier, the bee-bird, and the roller, also birds unknown to me, a little magpie, a long-tailed blackbird and others—butterflies, too, in some variety, and flowers, yellow and blue, one like the convolvulus minor. Later, the country opened into a vast cultivated plain, perfectly level, but with fine mountain ranges to the west, a very light soil, but improving as we got further from the coast, though nowhere good on this day’s journey. It is easy to understand a drought causing general famine. The cultivation is much as in the rest of Central Asia, lightly ploughed lands, without fences or boundaries, scattered trees, acacias or banyans, and at great distances villages; no sign anywhere of ‘gentlemen’s seats,’ or of any habitation better than the poorest, herds of lean sheep or goats, the only cattle a few buffaloes. The whole country has been recently under water, and this year at least there ought to be crops, but they are not yet out of the ground.

“At Kumara Puran we came to some low hills, which I think were of red granite, and here the country was greener, with millet and rice crops, and more trees. I noticed mulberry trees as well as banyans, and near the station, Australian gums. Much water about in the pools. After these hills the land improved, growing more beautiful; but night came on, and though there was a full moon we saw little more. About half-past seven the train came to a stop, and we were made to get out and walk some two or three hundred yards, as the rails had been washed away by a flood. All around the frogs were croaking in thousands. In another place was a fine old stone bridge broken down, with a great stoppage of bullock carts, and we arrived about nine o’clock at Madura. I was almost dead with fatigue. Two Mohammedans, Abd-el-Aziz Sahib and another, were awaiting us at the station, but I could do nothing but get to bed.

“13th Nov.—Madura is a pretty place, with palm trees and flocks of parrots. In the early morning we watched them flying overhead, talking as they went. At nine the Mohammedans came again, accompanied by an alem of Arab descent, a sayyid, who spoke good Arabic, but with a peculiar old-fashioned accent. We had a long talk, principally about the misfortunes of their community. The Moslems throughout Southern India have always been a very small minority—descendants of the former Mogul rulers of the country—for the mass of the population never conformed to Islam. In those days they occupied the chief posts under Government and in the army, but these have now passed away from them to the Hindus, who are preferred to them for Government employment because of their better knowledge of English and better schooling. Their cry then is for schools, that they, too, may be employed. Unlike the Moors of Ceylon, none of them are engaged in trade, nor have they any means of embarking in commerce. Only a few are shop-keepers. About a dozen have lands, on which they live, and the rest work for wages for their daily bread. Many died in the famine seven years ago. They are decreasing in numbers and wealth, and are overridden, they say, by the ‘kafrs.’ It is difficult to see any way out of this state of things, and I doubt even if schools would help them much. The alem had heard of course of Arabi, and also of me; and they all took great interest in the affairs of Islam beyond the seas. But their ideas are vague. They asked us several times if we were not relations of the Queen, and I had some difficulty in explaining our system of government. They enquired with great interest whether it was true that the Russian Emperor had sent troops to Afghanistan, and their faces brightened when I told them that, though I knew nothing of troops, I had seen in the papers that a Russian Envoy had appeared at Kabul. I fancy they look forward to a restoration some day of Mohammedan Government under Russian protection as a way out of their difficulties. Here, however, it is not easy to imagine any such event, for Hinduism is clearly all-powerful, and the Mohammedans are few, and they are strangers in the land.”

Madura is indeed the most interesting Hindu city in India, the place where the ancient Brahminical religion has been least touched by foreign conquest, Mogul, or French, or English. There is absolutely no sign in the city of anything alien. We did not see a European face, or a trace of Saracenic architecture. A festival was going on and an immense crowd thronged the streets, thousands and thousands of men dressed in white, with ochre patches on their foreheads, and of women in their beautiful gauze drapery, and carrying flowers. Fortunately I had never heard of Madura and its famous temple, and it was by accident that we came upon it as we wandered without guide through the streets. I find the following very inadequate description of it:

“In the afternoon we drove about the town, the most interesting I ever saw, and went over the Palace and the Temple. The Palace is a fine thing, but is being pitilessly restored at great expense by the Madras Government. Its proportions, however, remain, and it may be hoped that the damp air will tone down some of the raw plaster work quickly. We found it the home of squirrels and parrots and other birds. The view of the Blue Mountains from its roof is one of the loveliest imaginable. The Temple, however, is quite another thing. It is the supreme sight of Madura, and indeed, one might profitably travel from England and return only to have seen this. It is not only unmatched, but is beyond all comparison with the rest of the buildings I have seen in the East, as far beyond them as St. Mark’s at Venice is beyond Spurgeon’s Tabernacle. In shape it is a vast square composed of courts and halls, and corridors, deep in shade, with open spaces where the sun pours down. At the corners are four structures, like great Towers of Babel, covered, or rather encrusted, with sculptured gods, monsters, and devils, the whole enclosed with an immense stone wall, where there are no apertures. The door by which we entered from the street gave little idea of what was within. It might have been the entrance to a bazaar, and its comparative meanness enhanced the quite unexpected wonder we were about to see. It opened on to a kind of covered way, whose roof was supported by rows of figures carved in stone, grotesque and monstrous, but still finely sculptured, the lower parts of them black with the elbow polish of many generations of worshippers. This corridor was perhaps three hundred yards in length, and at its entrance were a number of open shops, where goods connected with the worship were being sold—‘the buyers and sellers of the Temple’—always thronged with worshippers grotesque as their gods, with painted foreheads, and sometimes painted bodies.

“We passed through the crowd unquestioning and unquestioned. There was no one to explain the meaning of anything we saw. I walked on as in a dream, being still weak with my late fever, and because of the hot sun outside. Presently the shut street widened, and we came to elephants, painted, too, with gilded tusks, which might have been statues, so quietly they stood, but for the flapping of their ears and the swaying of their trunks. Beyond them the street once more narrowed, and was crossed by the framework of a pair of huge gates of brass, carved also with innumerable gods. Through this we stepped and at last came out upon an open square tank, surrounded with galleries, carved and painted, and surmounted with the palm trees which grow inside the Temple, and at the extreme corner by one of the Babylonian Towers. Here naked men were washing in the green water, and we turned aside attracted by a distant sound of chaunting. We were once more in the gloom, and passed through halls and corridors of growing obscurity towards what seemed to be the Temple itself, ‘The Holy of Holies.’ Men here were sitting in a ring upon the floor, and there were arches of palm trees wreathed with flowers, and we smelt the smell of incense. It was from these the chaunting came, but no one took notice of us as we passed. Then we came on to another open court, where there were more elephants, and we saw one led away with brass bells upon it, ringing as it went. Then on through other corridors and still through thousands of sculptured gods, where worshippers were offering flowers, and so back once more to the open street of the town. I cannot describe it more. It is a temple, the home of a worship living still, as it lived three thousand years ago, and still the resort of a nation of worshippers. A temple, not a mere house of prayer, and one where the ancient gods of wood and stone and bronze and gold are still propitiated with offerings and adorned with wreaths of flowers. I was thoroughly tired out with what I had seen, but perhaps for this the better pleased.”

The same night we went on our way northwards, by train, and stopped while it was still dark at Trichinopoly.

“14th Nov.—We were awakened this morning in the rest house where we had slept by a sound of martial music, military noises, ‘and the shouting of the captains,’ or rather by the hoarse voice of an old English general giving the word of command to two thousand Madras Infantry on the parade ground close by. This was the first sign of anything English since landing in India, for not so much as a white official had been visible on the railway, and these sounds were like the breaking of a spell, though still we came in contact with no Englishmen. We drove after breakfast to another celebrated temple, passing through the town and under the fort. In the streets we met a pretty marriage procession, the bride mounted on a pony, and covered with golden ornaments, and again, a young married pair similarly decked out in an open carriage. The Temple of Trichinopoly is at a considerable distance beyond the town, as large, but less interesting than that of Madura, the roofed portion being smaller, nor are there the same carved gods, nor the same appearance of ancient and daily use. We saw it, too, under less perfect circumstances, for the guides of the place had found us out, and insisted on explaining all we did not want to know, and making the elephants salute us, an incongruous thing. It is hateful to be here as members of the alien ruling caste, reverenced and feared, and secretly detested. We paid our guides and the mahouts with open hands. It was all we could do to make them amends for our presence.

“As the day wore on, returning from the temple, we once more found the roads alive with men and women, most of the men wearing the Brahminical paint. There are two clearly distinct types of countenance among the people, one with narrow retreating forehead, thick overhanging eyebrows, and coarse features, the other refined and handsome, with here and there a head (for all go uncovered) which might have belonged to a Roman senator, yet distinctly not European. These last are, I suppose, of Aryan descent, the other of Dravidian. The common peasants here have all the appearance of savages, so much so that one expects to see bows and arrows in their hands. They go naked to the waist, and bareheaded, shaving the front part of the skull, but wearing their hair long behind. Nearly all the townsmen are painted with white dabs and streaks, but the Brahmins have a coloured stripe down the forehead, with a stripe of white on either side. Some of the young Brahmins are very handsome, and in their clean white clothes, with books under their arms, are in striking contrast with the peasantry.

“At Tanjore we saw yet another temple, with its colossal bull under a stone canopy. It is said to be a monolith, but is painted to imitate bronze. What interested us most was a series of portraits of Siwaji and his descendants, once rulers of the country, in a little shrine, the whole enclosure surrounded by a deep moat, and fortified, but without worshippers, and all deserted. The palace near it is still occupied by Siwaji’s descendants, dispossessed and pensioned. They are only women now who live on in this rambling place, shut up, sad remains of state greatly out at elbows. The rooms are fine. In the library they showed us some interesting Indian paintings of the last century, and an illustrated book of Chinese tortures, which we may imagine the last Rajah consoling himself with after his loss of power. It was a festival day, and we saw the pomp and glory of the little court turned out, two elephants and two camels, a dozen poor led horses, one mounted officer and twenty soldiers, aged retainers most of these, put into cast-off English uniforms.” The dispossessed Princes of India always reminded me of captive wild beasts shut up in cages, lame and diseased, and dying of their lack of moral exercise.

The last two days of our journey to Madras we were without any native communication, as we had got beyond our recommendations from Ceylon, and on the other hand had come in contact as yet with no Europeans. My journal deals principally with the natural features of the country, which had become now flat and monotonous, with crops of rice, mostly under irrigation. I find a list of birds seen from the train: egret, pied bittern, little bittern, snipe, pied kingfisher, whiteheaded kite, kite, hoopoe, a variety of roller, bee-bird, lark, parrot, hen-harrier, shrike, long-tailed blackbird, myna, partridge, a variety of pheasant, dove, crow, sandpiper, small cormorant, kestrel, sea-gull, magpie, robin, besides many small birds I did not see near enough to identify. I also saw tracks of wild boars in one place. At Chingleput hills began, and a pretty country with large lakes and tracts of jungle, the formation granite with red earth and boulders.

“17th Nov.—Madras. A horrible place. We are at Lippert’s Hotel, facing the sea, with a broad esplanade in front, down which the red dust drives. We wrote our names down at Government House. They took us at first by mistake to the Government Office in the Fort, where I was invited to sign my name in a book as ‘an officer returning from furlough, and demanding an extension of leave.’ Government House, when we got there, was a white pillared edifice standing in a dreary park. There was a sentry at the door, but no other living soul, not even a footman out of livery, or a charwoman, to tell us that ‘the family was out of town,’ but the doors were open and a book was there. Mr. and Mrs. Grant Duff are at Guindi, another residence seven miles off.”

We stayed a week in Madras, which was longer than I had intended, but as soon as it became known that I had arrived I began to receive visits from the more prominent natives, Hindus as well as Mohammedans, which interested me.

My first visitors at Madras were a couple of Hindu gentlemen, editors of the local newspaper, the “Hindu”; their names, Subramania Ayer and Vira Raghava Chaya; intelligent, clear-headed men, contrasting by no means unfavourably with men of their profession in London. Their manners were good, and their conversation brilliant. The matters principally discussed between us were the heavy pressure of the Land Revenue on the Madras peasantry, the burden of the salt tax, the abuses connected with the Civil courts, the ruin of the cotton manufacture and industry by the enforced free trade with England, the unreality of the so-called “productive work,” especially as to roads, and the conservative opposition of the covenanted Civil Service to all reform—neither viceroys nor governors were able to oppose them. I asked what was thought of Lord Ripon by the mass of the people. “He is the first Viceroy,” my visitor said, “who has been known to them by name in this Presidency. Hitherto the people have only known the local collector, but Lord Ripon’s name is known. Indeed he is looked upon by the ignorant, especially since the recent agitation on the Ilbert Bill, as a new incarnation of God.” “And Mr. Grant Duff?” I asked. “We consider him,” he said, “a failure. He came out as Governor of Madras with great expectations, and we find him feeble, sickly, unable to do his work himself, and wholly in the hands of the permanent officials. The Duke of Buckingham, of whom we expected less, did much more, and much better.”

I found this opinion of Grant Duff a very general one among the natives. Though a clever man, he had spent all his life in the confined atmosphere of the House of Commons, and was quite unable to deal with a state of society so strange to him as that which he found in India. I was constantly asked by them what line they should take, and what hope there was for them of any kind of self government or real reform. And I explained to them frankly what the position of parties was in England, that the Radicals, of whom Lord Ripon was in some degree one, would be glad enough to see India governed for the Indians; that the Tories made no pretence of governing India except in English interests, and by the sword; and that between them stood the Whigs, who talked about progress, but always left things standing as they were. My advice was that they should press their grievances now while Lord Ripon was in power, as there was some chance of their being listened to, avoiding only anything like disorder, which would be a pretext with the Home Government, which was purely Whig, to stop such few reforms as Lord Ripon had begun. I encouraged them, however, to continue the agitation for representative Government in the Councils, and thought they might get it in twenty or twenty-five years time. Their general answer was, they would be satisfied if they got it in a hundred years.

These first visitors sent others to me, and a clever young Brahmin, Varada Rao, constituted himself my cicerone with those who were afraid to come to me openly. The most interesting of those he took me to visit, though it was not timidity but advanced age which had prevented him calling, was the old Mahratta Brahmin, Ragunath Rao, some time minister of Holkar and brother of the still better known Madhava Rao, a man of the highest distinction, much wit, and the widest possible intelligence. Indeed, his conversation might have been that of a Socrates, whom in person he much resembled, being a little rugged man whom I found very simply clad in a shirt, a blue head-dress, and with no shoes or stockings to his feet, but who at his first word impressed me with a sense of his integrity and his vast intellectual superiority. On the high politics of India his discourse was most instructive, and, like Socrates, he had the habit of illustrating each point of his discourse with a story always good and often extremely amusing. He dwelt especially on the difference there was between the old-fashioned personal rule of the Indian Princes, with whom there was always the possibility of a personal appeal to the head of the State, and the blank seclusion of the English rulers, who were walled off from all knowledge of what was going on by their ignorance of native life and their complete severance from native society. In old times it had not been thus. Under the East India Company, when communication with England was rare and difficult, the English officials and even the Governors and Governors-General were thrown to a large extent for their society on the Indians of rank and position, whose language they had been obliged to learn and with whom they lived on a footing of something like equality. Now they lived wholly among themselves, and were almost without intercourse with natives of any class, except perhaps the lowest, whom they treated at best with good-humoured contempt. Thus they heard nothing and knew nothing and cared nothing for the feelings and opinions of the people, and the abyss between the rulers and the ruled was every year increasing.

He described with great humour the position of a modern Viceroy, who comes to Calcutta, or rather to Simla, with the idea of understanding the native case and doing good, and who finds himself with a crowd of permanent English officials always surrounding him and pulling him by the coat tail whenever he approaches what they consider a dangerous subject. His term of years as Viceroy is at most five. The first two are occupied in getting used to the climate and way of life, in learning how to behave and what to say to the native princes, in studying the history of past affairs, and learning the official view of the larger questions he has to deal with. The next two years, if he is an honest man and man of energy, he begins to propound his policy, only to find that he is everywhere defeated in detail by officials who bow to him and pretend to agree with him, but who go away and raise obstacles which defeat his ends, or at any rate delay them till his power to enforce them is nearly over. Usually he swims with the official stream, saves what money he can out of his immense salary, shoots tigers, and amuses himself with viceregal tours and visits and durbars to the native princes, spending half his years always away from native India in the Himalayas, and giving balls and entertainments to the Anglo-Indian ladies. The last year of his term he is looked upon as already defunct and of no importance, and he packs up his things and goes home satisfied with having done no worse than his predecessors.